Field of Invention
This invention relates to information access.
Description of Related Art
Foraging for related information is unnecessarily difficult for a user. In conventional search engines, a user must compose a query. However, it may take a user several iterations to compose a query—submitting first queries and looking at results. This is because the user does not already know exactly what he seeks and does not know exactly what is available. Furthermore, on a small, mobile device, query text entry can be awkward and time-consuming.
Also, the main source of revenue for conventional search engines is through advertisements. Conventional search engines have a limited opportunity to present a user with sponsored links or targeted advertisements. They mainly present advertisements when users look at a search page. Once a user clicks on a results link, however, the advertisements disappear because the user's browser loads the information from the linked page.
Some conventional systems based on information scent accept a search term and an index and compute a smaller index based on the most-closely-related words in the larger index. The scent index provides a source of possible information targets, a way of picking a most-closely-related subset of a particular size, and a means for displaying the results. However, conventional information scent index systems do not compute queries from context.
Conventional browsers like Mozilla FireFox sometimes provide a facility for highlighting a portion of the text from a web page and then requesting that a search be performed using a search service, such as Google. The string of characters from the highlighted text is used as a query. The browser then brings up a page of search results. However, these conventional browsers do not perform analysis of the content. The highlighted text is simply taken as a search string. Moreover, the search returns a conventional list of ranked pages and lacks a persistent overview.
In Query Free News Search, Monika Henzinger, Bay-Wei Chang, Brian Milch, Sergey Brin, Query-Free News Search, WWW 2003, May 20-24, 2003, Henzinger describes query free search of news information. This conventional system finds news articles on the web that are relevant to news currently being broadcast. The query is computed from the closed caption of the news story and the information targets are computed from a collection of online news stories.
The Google Desktop Sidebar is an example of a conventional query-free retrieval system. The Google Sidebar attempts to show mini-displays of information that may be relevant to the user. For example, if a user tends to look at certain kinds of news stories, the Google system displays links to new stories on that topic. This conventional system also shows web clips, photos, hot news, local weather, and so on. However, the user interest profile is built-up over successive queries over time. Thus, the displayed information may not be as relevant to current information foraging activities.
Conventional online advertising systems use text analysis for placing advertisements on web pages—as in the placement of banner ads and side ads by companies such as Google® and Yahoo!®. These conventional systems analyze the content of a current web page and then add banner or side bar advertisements for products related to the content of the web page. However, these conventional technologies select advertisements and sponsored links based on the user's query and a keyword auction, rather than an analysis of related materials of interest.